Friday, 30 March 2012

This section is also from the talk I did for the USGA and this section is about what a change in maintenance could do for golf.﻿

this is actually all you need - Lossiemouth

I would
like to see a future with a more British or Australian style approach to turf
maintenance. I personally think that the playing conditions are superior to
ours since golf is best played firm and fast. I do think architects need to
recognize this future and make sure the running approach is almost always an
option in the courses we work with.

The
transition will be toughest on superintendents at older courses where the turf
conversion to bentgass and more fescues will take a long process. That’s why I see value in starting now
with tree removal programs designed to help conversion programs.

I’m
not so sure about whether we will see lots of green re-grassing, but I certainly do see a movement towards
re-grassing of fairways and tees in preparation for a reduction on inputs. The
one question I have is whether we will continue to seed with the new turf types
that have high maintenance requirements or whether we will see a shift back to
some older alternatives that require less maintenance.

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photo by Brian Ewan

﻿

What I
do think you need from architects is recognition of how this will impact play.
We’ve had decades of architects making courses only accessible to aerial play.If we
are going to go firm and fast we need to open up the ground game as an option
for the average player.

Perhaps we need a
complete change of focus. When talking with the Superintendents
in Melbourne they talked about maintaining where you are supposed to be playing from and
largely ignoring where you are not supposed to be. The idea was largely based upon
limited water, but when you think about how much money we spend on green lush
rough it does make you question our choices.

I think there is far too much emphasis placed on
maintaining, irrigating and grooming our rough. When a player finds the left or
right side of the hole, they are almost always in a poor position to approach
the green. That in itself is a penalty for poor play. Imagine the savings on
water, irrigation, fertilizer and manpower if we simply did not actively manage
our rough and let it the rough play as the weather dictates.

﻿

Bandon has the idea right about sustainability

﻿

On that end I wish we did what the
Australians do and simply let our courses have seasonality in their
presentation. Australian courses go from brown to green and back to brown again
depending on rain. We may need to convert over our roughs to become more
drought tolerant, but the savings in water use and irrigation heads easily
justifies this.

There is no question in my mind
that Superintendents would embrace an even more sustainable approach to golf
maintenance now if they knew their jobs were not linked to the current level of
expectations. We as architects need to drive this concept, educate the
memberships and help them understand that their course may occasionally look a little less than
perfect but it will play even better than before.

Thursday, 29 March 2012

This is another excerpt from my presentation given at the USGA Conference.

Changes at Pinehurst vastly reduced the water requirements

Everyone involved in Golf
acknowledges the biggest potential crisis is a shortage of water. In most areas
there is already intense pressure for golf courses to reduce their consumption.In some
communities there is heavy restriction on how and when water can be used and in
some locals there is no water available for new projects.

The most common practice today is for golf courses to make use
of the excess water collected during
high water flow in our creeks and streams. And because of that most golf
courses have built storage ponds to hold water for future use when
restrictions are in place. I see a future where golf courses might have to be self-sustaining. Courses could collect
all run-off, rainfall and melt using a massive network of drainage and store it
in a series of holding ponds large enough to supply water all year.

The
one option that is becoming more common is the use of treated water.
Some of the sources are reasonable, others are terrible. Municipalities use the
golf courses to filter their treated water before it returns back into the
aquifer. The big issue will be the level of salinity. Some have suggested grey water, but that is also dependent upon the quality. The one answer may be a split system where fresh water is used for greens and treated water for the remainder.

My experience
with treated water is that during periods of drought, the turf suffers as the salinity
builds up in the soil, and only after a good rain does the health of the turf
return. This is quite similar to many of the urban courses where the creek or
river is used as part of a city’s storm water management system and the water
quality fluctuates.

It’s essential to understand the impact of the water source before any grassing is selected or before the maintenance approach is decised.

Wednesday, 28 March 2012

The following is an excerpt from my presentation of An Enviornmental Approach To Golf Architecture. This section was from the section on the importance of growing enviornments in the quest to lower inputs. (Inputs would be defined as water, fertilizer, herbiciide and pesticide)

The
only way to lower inputs is by concentrating on growing environments.
Architects need to spend far more effort making sure ever green site is an excellent
place to grow turf and a lot less time worrying about aesthetics.

The
simply answer is that any tree interrupting 5 hours of morning sun and nine
hours of daily sun is an impediment to an environmentally sensitive approach to
maintenance. Ask the clubs that I work with, I am a ruthless tree hater, but
that’s the only way to achieve the goal of healthy turf.

One of
the reasons the British courses can get away with minimal inputs is the growing
environments. They receive full sun, are wide open to the wind and in most
cases are built on well drained soils. We can’t duplicate those conditions but we
can cut enough trees for adequate light and airflow.

Soils
are a little tougher issue here. Most of our soils are tight and yet in most
instances very little has been done to improve the drainage. Greens should be a
given, but so should chipping areas, approaches, fairway hollows and even under
some key tees if we want to reduce the inputs. We need to address compaction and
moisture as much as sunlight and airflow if our intention is minimal inputs.

The
biggest change everyone needs to make is their view of trees. Environmentalists
want us to reduce our inputs and use less water, but they also want us to keep
as many trees on the site as we can. What they fail to see is the contradiction
they create. The trees will always out-compete the turf and the superintendent
will be forced to supplement the turf to help it survive. The trees have to go
in order to promote sustainability. Tree by-laws are now the greatest detriment
to a better environmental solution and we need to lobby to make that clear.

The
reality is the more trees we remove around the golf course, the less likely we
are to require input and the more likely we are to promote the turf we want to
develop. It’s imperative that we eliminating shade, root competition and create
airflow if we want to produce optimal conditions.

Monday, 5 March 2012

I believe in the last dozen years social media has played a
role in shaping the direction of golf architecture. The emergence of social
media has seen the rise of new writers, dedicated architecture web sites and new
breed of architect who has been media savvy enough to understand the change. I personally
believe social media played a role in ending the era of Modern Architecture and
popularizing Minimalism.

The internet has changed golf architecture itself. It gave us
a new and more efficient resource to search for information on any living or
dead architect, a source of photos of their work and a list of articles written
about them. It even provided a way of directly contacting them for more
information. Golf architects and golf architecture has never been more easily
accessible to the average person.

But it goes beyond what is available. The internet has given
the average person a voice. Anyone with interest in golf architecture can share
their own opinions and associate with others who share their same passion. Since
the internet allows people with similar interests to associate easily, we have
seen the emergence of architecture discussion groups. Originally populated by people
from the golf industry but it wasn’t long before passionate enthusiasts found
the sites providing a much more dynamic presence.

The good was the amount of new information that became
easily available as people who loved architecture as people shared research,
experiences and images of what they had seen and what was being built. Since
golf was in a transition period from Modernism to Minimalism it was a very
exciting time to be able to watch change and new ideas coming forth in almost
real time. Everyone was hooked by the fact they learnt about what was new at
the same time as the insiders did.

But like everything good on the internet it had its down
side too. Everything about golf architecture was slowly broken down into black
and white and heroes and villains. Their heroes never make mistakes and have been deified,
the villains never do anything right and should be driven out of business.
And the vast majority of work being done is being missed because people perfer to concentrate only on the names they know well.

Initially golf architecture writing was enriched by the
addition of some wonderful new thoughtful and resourceful voices. But they too
are being drowned out by the volume of web sites and web based writers. The quality
of writing has dropped as there are fewer and fewer professional writers who able
to make a living since a lot of content is generated for free by enthusiasts. Even worse is the blatant plagerism seen on many golf web sites.

Even design has been influenced.
One of the stranger things I have watched emerge is “populist design.” For perspective we have
seen this in the past when architects in the 1960’s copied Trent Jones or
in the 1980’s copied the work of Pete Dye. But in the last ten years I’ve
watched architects routinely “lift” the aesthetic of another architect and use it on their latest work. They go
online, see what they think is cool and copy the technique. Some go as far as hiring the same shapers. Nothing hurts a style or movement faster than being overwhelmed by insincere versions of the original.

The worst aspect of this is that architects are trying to capture
the attention of golf discussion groups and golf writers by being "current". I cringe particularly at the firms who directly lift one
style after another, year in and year out, trying to keep up with “fashion”.
The internet has made this easy and I think golf design is paying the price. I knew
Modernism was dead the day when all but one significant Modern Architect opened
their latest course with “Minimalist looking” bunkering.

The influence of Social media is here to stay. Some architects have already adapted
and made themselves far more accessible by participating in social media. They post
in public forums write for internet publications and some even write their own
blogs. This has become part of a modern media strategy because
they recognize the mainstream media follows social media sites looking for new
and refreshing ideas to write about.

The power of social media is the illusion that fame is just one click away…

Friday, 2 March 2012

This particular
blog is now a year old and has received just over 100,000 visitors. Last month
it had just over 10,000 visitors and the site is averaging 350 visitors a day. I
had no idea of the power of social media when I started in 2006. I do now…

I
reluctantly got into the blog in 2006 through the urging of Robert Thompson a
golf writer and good friend. He saw it as a way to get “all those strong views”
out to other people in the golf industry. I know I frustrated some, entertained
others, but slowly found a group of similar minded people who enjoyed the
journey. I stuck to writing regularly and shared my deepest thoughts on design by
the end of the first run (June 2008) I had 6,000 visitors a month. I stopped
because I was spent.

In that
period I was invited to write for magazines and begun to get quoted in the
press and re-posted on other web sites. I found the blogging helped get my name
out to people who had vener heard of me before. I returned to blogging in April
2009 and wrote on the Weir Design Web Site. But that was a failure with the
site being ignored by Google so I eventually changed back to blogger one year
ago.Unfortunately they would not let me
return to my dormant original site so I moved everything I had onto the new
blog and began writing again. The first few months were real quiet, but after a
few months the site took off and now I have 350 visitors a day.

A few months
back I begrudgingly joined Facebook. I happen to dislike Facebook and see it as
one of the great time wasters of our generation. But like blogging I understand
the reach that it has in modern society. I joined and found this to be another major
source of traffic. The next stage would be twitter.

I can’t
stand twitter, but recently I saw a presentation on social media by Chris
Tritabaugh and it opened my eyes to the potential. He began with a tweat and
then showed us the reach of that tweat at the end of the presentation. That
impressed me, but I was far more impressed by how the golf superintendent’s
community turned Twitter into a useful tool. He talked about how supers send
images, seek opinions or ask questions seeking a better solution for something
they think can be more effectively. They then collect the feedback, consider potential
solutions and occasionally try something new.They use Twitter to widen their perspective for finding equipment using
its international scope to find unusual products or equipment. I don’t see a
similar application for architects, but I’ve learnt not to be so quick to
dismiss the tool till I try.

One of the
more complicated aspects of being a golf designer is finding work. It’s easier
to find work close to home where you know the potential clients and the
distances are all manageable in a day by car. To widen your possibilities you
would venture to other cities and meet with potential clients and talk at
conferences or regional meetings trying to let people know you were out there
and interested in the work.

Social media
is a game changer for our profession.

We are in an
era where people seek their information from the internet. Where they once
depended on television, books and magazines for insight, they now go to web
sites and chat rooms to glean the latest information. We are in a society that once
anyone has a curiosity they want that information instantly and will go to the
quickest and easiest source … the internet.

Being a
creative communicator in this era is critical since something interesting or
clever can become the catalyst to drawing attention to the designer. The joy of
social media is there are so many options to choose from and each link very
well together. Once you have shared your opinion piece or interesting project
onto a social media site it has the potential to reach a very large audience.
The designer now has the ability to make personal contact all over the world in
an instant opening up the potential for work in almost any community.